2016 Topic for Hillary: Refusal to Put Boko Haram on Terror List

As the 2016 presidential election approaches, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be forced to explain just why she fought against placing the murderous Nigerian Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram on the official U.S. list of worldwide terrorists.

MSNBC analyst China Okasi said on "The Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell, "This is going to be a problem for Hillary Clinton because Boko Haram has been around for quite a while.

"When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she was a bit reluctant to put the group on the terrorist list because she did not want to give the group the validation," Okasi said on the Monday program.

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Giving Boko Haram the official designation of being a terrorist group would allow the U.S. to freeze banking assets held by the group, add group members to no-fly lists and focus law enforcement on the group's activities, the Daily Mail reports.

The Washington Free Beacon notes that Boko Haram finally made it onto the official U.S. terrorist group list on Nov. 13, 2013, placed there by Secretary of State John Kerry, who referred to the group as "without question one of the most evil and threatening terrorist entities on the planet today."

MSNBC notes that the brutal terrorist group is responsible for more than 10,000 deaths in Nigeria in 2014, and for causing over 200,000 to flee their homes.

The group kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls, and in a recent attack destroyed the Nigerian town of Baga, killing 2,000. They have been known to use 10-year-old girls as suicide bombers, MSNBC said.

Clinton already has begun backtracking, saying that Boko Haram's act in kidnapping the girls was “abominable, it’s criminal, it’s an act of terrorism and it really merits the fullest response possible, first and foremost from the government of Nigeria."

At the Twitter site #BringBackOurGirls, Clinton tweeted, "Access to education is a basic right & an unconscionable reason to target innocent girls."

At the time, the Daily Mail notes, Boko Haram already had threatened to murder U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Terence McCulley.

A former State Department official told the Daily Mail, "Bulking up the FTO (Foreign Terrorist Organizations) list was not what anyone in leadership wanted. At some point it became as much about how things looked as what needed to happen."

Obama, campaigning for the 2012 elections, wanted to maintain the appearance that al-Qaida, affiliated with Boko Haram, virtually had been destroyed, the Daily Mail said.

"We all understood, as the State Department does today, that al-Qaeda is far from being defeated," the former official told the Daily Mail.

"But no one wants to say that in a swing state, right?"
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As the 2016 presidential election approaches, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be forced to explain just why she fought against placing the Nigerian Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram on the official U.S. list of worldwide terrorists.